New Concerns About Lack Of Transparency Surrounding Iran Nuclear Deal

Senate Hearing on Iran Nuclear Deal

Iran and the Bomb

WATCH: Netanyahu Begs Americans To Oppose The Iran Deal, While New Poll Shows They Got His Message

Poll American public split over nuclear deal with Iran Fox News Video

Trump, Cruz thump Iran nuclear deal at Capitol Hill rally

By Dana Bash, Eugene Scott and Jeremy Diamond, CNN

Presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz took to the steps of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, each using their trademark fiery rhetoric to slam President Barack Obama’s proposed Iran nuclear deal.

Taking the podium with R.E.M.’s “The End of the World” blaring, the real estate mogul used a brief speech to say that if elected, four Americans being held in Iran will return to the U.S. before he takes office.

“I’ve never seen something so incompetently negotiated — and I mean never,” Trump said.

Trump followed Cruz, who said that if Congress approves the current deal, Iran could end up developing a weapon that could kill millions along the Atlantic seaboard.

“If Senate Democrats decide that party loyalty matters more than national security and if Republican leadership decides that showboating is more important than stopping this deal, then the single most important issue in 2016 will be stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Trump said Cruz was one of the first to support him when he shared some of his immigration policies.

“I like him. He likes me. He’s backed me 100%,” he said. “Ted Cruz was out there and he really backed me very strongly and I always respected that. He asked me to come along and I guess he figured we’d get a big crowd and we certainly have.”

And 6-in-10 Americans also disapprove of President Barack Obama’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Iran, according to the poll.

The American public’s growing disapproval of the Iran deal stems from an increasing partisan polarization over the deal with more Republicans opposing and more Democrats embracing the nuclear deal. And it comes amid a full-court press from Obama and his administration to sell the deal to the public and to members of Congress ahead of a key vote on the deal next month — with Republicans knocking his efforts at every turn.

Republican opposition has jumped to 83% from 66% last month while 70% of Democrats now say Congress should approve the deal, up from 61% in July.

The number of independents opposing the deal, meanwhile, remains steady as a majority — now 58% — continues to believe Congress should reject the deal.

Republican politicians have been nearly unanimous in their opposition to the deal with most of the party’s presidential field expressing outrage and opposition to the deal almost as soon as it was announced.

And with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton expressing her support for the deal, it is likely to become a defining issue in the 2016 election.

A slice of the opposition to the deal may be drawn from the partisan politics behind it as half of the American surveyed said they supported a deal that would ease some economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for major restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and greater international inspections of its nuclear sites — essentially the terms agreed to by Iran and six world powers.

With nearly all Republicans committed to opposing the deal when it comes up for a vote next month, Obama will likely have to pull out his veto pen to keep the deal alive.

Two leading Senate Democrats — Sen. Charles Schumer of New York and Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey — have already announced their opposition to the deal and vowed to vote to override Obama’s veto if necessary.

But unless another 11 Senate Democrats join that bandwagon, opponents of the deal won’t have the votes to keep the agreement from going into effect.

The Pros and Cons of the Iranian Nuclear Deal

By CHRISTOPHER A. PREBLE

Earlier today in Vienna, international negotiators reached a deal with Iran over its nuclear program. The New York Times reports that the agreement will eventually lift oil and financial sanctions, “in return for limits on Iran’s nuclear production capability and fuel stockpile over the next 15 years.” The international restrictions on Iranian arms exports will remain in place for up to 5 years, and the ban on ballistic missile exports could remain for up to 8 years.

In a televised statement this morning, President Obama defended his decision to engage in the negotiations “from a position of strength” and assured the American people that, under the deal, “Iran will not be able to achieve a nuclear weapon.” His opponents are sure to challenge both assertions.

The deal, Obama said, “is not built on trust, it is built on verification.” Those verification provisions appeared to have been one of the final sticking points in the negotiations. According to the Associated Press, the Iranians agreed to allow inspection of Iranian military sites, “something the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had long vowed to oppose,” but such inspections are not the surprise, snap inspections that some had pushed for.

The focus now turns to the Senate, which has 60 days to review the agreement. Senators could vote to block it, but Obama has already pledged that he would veto any legislation that prohibits the deal’s implementation. He has a reasonably strong hand to play. Even if all Senate Republicans vote to kill the deal, opponents would need at least a dozen Senate Democrats to vote with them in order to override the president.

Expect the details of the nearly 100-page document to come under close scrutiny, even though many opponents don’t appear to believe that the specifics matter that much. For them, nearly any deal is a bad deal.

For example, the latest entrant into the 2016 Republican presidential contest, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, yesterday pledged to “terminate the bad deal with Iran on Day One” – before the terms were even finalized. And he predicted that any other Republican president would do the same. Arkansas’s freshman Senator Tom Cotton has publicly stated that his object has been to blow up any deal. For Walker, Cotton, and others you don’t negotiate with a regime like Iran’s – you destroy it.

But counter proliferation by means of regime change has a bad odor today, thanks chiefly to the Iraq war that, coincidentally, many of the most outspoken Iran deal opponents had a hand in pushing on the American people beginning in the late 1990s.

They have learned nothing, it appears, but most Americans have: refusing to engage diplomatically with an odious regime, or waging war to separate said regime from its weapons – by removing the regime from power – is a costly proposition, and there is no guarantee that the government that emerges in its place will be better than that which came before. George W. Bush came around to this view by the middle of his second term in office: the man who in 2002 cast Iran as a charter member of the Axis of Evil – along with Iraq and North Korea – supported the P5 + 1 negotiating process that eventually led to today’s deal.

So keep all this in mind in the coming weeks as the details of the Iran deal are debated in Washington and around the country. Deal opponents have an obligation to describe their preferred alternative, not merely what they are against.

I’m Always Chasing Rainbows Judy Garland

Over the Rainbow

Here are 10 ways Obama’s Iran nuclear daydream fails.

By Mortimer B. Zuckerman

“I’m always chasing rainbows, watching clouds drifting by. My schemes are just like all my dreams, ending in the sky.”

The vaudeville song by Caroll and McCarthy, popularized over the years by stars from Judy Garland to Barbra Streisand, is all too appropriate for this stage of the gravest threat to all our dreams: the prospect of mushroom clouds over the Middle East. The rainbow President Barack Obama has been chasing in his negotiations with Iran can more and more be seen for the dangerous illusion it is. He has forsaken decades of pledges from presidents of both parties speaking on behalf of the civilized world. He has misled the American people in affirming over and over that never would revolutionary Iran be able to acquire nuclear weaponry, a breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty signed by Iran and a guarantee of a nuclear arms race. In fact, one has already started. There are credible reports that Pakistan is ready to ship an atomic package to Saudi Arabia, the Sunni nation that sees Shiite Iran engaging, without restraint, in violence and subversion throughout the region.

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Editorial Cartoons on Barack Obama

Iran is so hell-bent on domination of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel, it is working across religious lines, according to intelligence reported in the Wall Street journal by Con Coughlin, the defense editor of Britain’s The Telegraph. Though Hamas is a Sunni Islamist terror group, Shiite Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have in the last few months sent Hamas al-Qassam brigades into Gaza on top of millions of dollars to help rebuild the network of tunnels the Israeli Defence Forces found and destroyed last summer. Imagine the amount of blackmail and bullying a nuclear Iran would do.

How far Obama is prepared to chase after rainbows is sadly illustrated by the candor of his Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist, who has been a party to the multistate negotiations with Iran. Look back first to Oct. 5, 2013 at the start of Obama’s second term. He answered questions about the U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons in these words:

“Our assessment continues to be a year or more away, and in fact, actually our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services.”

But this is not what Moniz said, according to Eli Lake in a Bloomberg News meeting in Washington this last Monday, April 20. The administration, he said, had estimated “for several years” that Iran was at most three months from enriching enough fissile material for a bomb. He added: “They are now, right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000 plus all the … R&D work. If you put that together, it’s very, very little time to go forward. That’s two to three months.”

This stunning casual remark was based on information apparently declassified on April 1. What is Obama up to? Why did his administration say reassuringly what it did in October 2013 when he knew it was misleading? Has he now allowed the declassification so as to create a false sense of urgency that his rainbow will vanish unless we reach out for it now?

Just compare where we are today with the conditions Obama laid down in 2013. Referring to Iran’s smiling new President Hassan Rouhani, the president recently said: “If in fact he [Rouhani] is able to present a credible plan that says Iran is pursuing peaceful nuclear energy but we’re not pursuing nuclear weapons, and we are willing to be part of an internationally verified structure so that all other countries in the world know they are not pursuing nuclear weapons, then, in fact, they can improve relations, improve their economy. And we should test that,” the president said.

Well, we have sucked the lemons. The taste is sourer than we feared:

1. Enrichment. Before the talks began, the Obama administration and the U.N. Security Council insisted for years that Iran stop all uranium enrichment. Now it allows Iran to continue enriching uranium.

2. Stockpile. In February 2015, Iran had 10,000 kilograms of enriched uranium due to be reduced to 300 kilograms through export to Russia, which would return it as rods for use in peaceful energy. It was an achievement for which Obama had legitimate pride. It reduced the risk the fuel could be diverted to a weapons program. But the risk remains. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Nabas Araqchi has told the Iranian media there is no question of sending the uranium abroad. It is another demonstration of how dealing with Iran is even dicier than with Russia. Ronald Reagan’s motto was “trust but verify.” With Iran, Obama’s is just: don’t trust. Yet he has agreed the fuel may stay inside the country – and there is no mechanism for reducing the stockpile.

3. Centrifuges. We wanted to cut back the number of installed centrifuges by about two-thirds. Iran’s centrifuges have multiplied from the beginning of the negotiations to almost 20,000 today. The U.S. initially called for limiting the number of Iranian enriching centrifuges from 500 to 1,500. The agreement now allows Iran a stunning 6,104 centrifuges. According to Iran’s foreign minister, they are able to use their advanced IR-8 centrifuges as soon as the nuclear deal with the world powers goes into effect, contrary to what the U.S. asserted. This would dramatically accelerate Iran’s potential progress, for the IR-8 centrifuges enrich uranium 20 times faster than the current IR-1 centrifuges.

4. Infrastructure. The closure of nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan, Natanz and Arak has been a key goal of the U.S. and its allies for the past decade or so. They at least wanted to limit the productivity of enriched uranium at the Natanz facility.

The 40 megawatt heavy-water nuclear plant at Arak produces plutonium that would be used to make a couple of bombs a year. Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, has correctly said that the Iranians do not need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. And yet it is to remain, albeit with reduced plutonium, we are assured. It should be shut down and its 100 tons of heavy water exported.

In December 2013, Obama similarly said that Iran had no need for the giant nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow. It is buried in a mountain fortress designed to withstand aerial attack. Now Iran is allowed to keep roughly 1,000 centrifuges there, we are told, to convert Fordow into a center for “peaceful purposes” and forego enriching uranium there for at least 15 years. But there is much unknown about the nature of the “research” and what might be achieved with new types of centrifuges and how soon they produce the material for a bomb after the expiration of the 10 years. The breakout time to a bomb could change significantly in the final years and may well have shrunk to zero as the Israelis assert.

5. Missiles. Iran has been stonewalling about answering outstanding International Atomic Energy Agency concerns about the possible military dimension of its nuclear program. The U.S. negotiators dropped demands that Iran restrict development of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could be used to deliver the warheads.

6. Duration. Initially the U.S. pushed for a framework transaction that would last over 20 years. Now the deal’s key terms sunset in 10 to 15 years. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz contend that the expiration of the framework agreement “will enable Iran to become a significant nuclear, industrial and military power.” That’s in a country with 80 million people and imperial appetite. “Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there – on complex new terms,” the secretaries wrote.

7. Enforcement. President Obama argues: “if Iran cheats, the world will know it” and “if we see something suspicious, we will inspect it.” But, as Michael Makovsky notes in the Weekly Standard, these inspections will not be intrusive enough to detect Iranian cheating or to thwart any breakout attempts in time. Quite the opposite. Iran has a long record of cheating on its international nuclear agreements. It has violated international agreements at least three times in the last year alone. Last November, the IAEA caught Iran operating a new advanced IR-5 centrifuge. Secretary Moniz has said IAEA inspectors must have “anywhere, anytime” access. Ayatollah Ali Khameini and his military say “no way.”

8. Sanctions. The proposed deal gives Iran precisely what it wanted – relief from economic sanctions in exchange for limited restraints on Iranian behavior. This makes the whole project vulnerable to evasion by Iran. They are past masters at that.

Obama talks about being able to “snap back” sanctions. That is just another color in the rainbow. You can get an idea of how easy it will be to restore the pressure by observing the attitude since our sellout on the lake in Lausanne of two of the big powers in the so-called 5+1 talks. China’s press refers to peaceful Iran as if it were Switzerland and Iran says it looks to China to help oil-rich Iran with nuclear power. Russia now says it is ready to sell Iran S-300 air defense missiles that will make much more risky, if not infeasible, any U.S., Israeli or Saudi attempt at aerial demolition of a nuclear threat. If the West does discover a violation, restoring the sanctions in place today will be almost impossible.

We should have waited to give the sanctions more time. These sanctions have already caused significant damage to Iran’s economy and brought the Iranians to the table in the first place. For they know that if the sanctions remain, the radical Iranian regime might not survive.

9. Good behavior. Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei is denouncing the United States as the Great Satan, making it clear that Iran does not expect to normalize relations with us anytime soon. His speeches indicate that Iran still sees itself in a holy war with the West.

10. Here is what is at the end of the rainbow. A U.S. seemingly willing to concede nuclear military capacity to the country our Mideast allies consider their principal threat. No wonder Saudi Arabia and others are insisting on at least an equivalent nuclear capability, for otherwise they face an even more dangerous and threatening environment. America’s traditional allies have concluded that the U.S. has traded temporary nuclear cooperation with Iran for acquiescence to Iran’s ultimate hegemony. When the U.N. Security Council approves the final draft, the sanctions against Iran would be lifted. Much of what Iran has already done in violation of its past treaty commitments may well now be legalized, which would free the Iranians of the sanctions imposed due to those violations.

The negative reaction to the inadequate safeguards in Obama’s deal has now forced him to acquiesce to Congress some power of review, reinforced by a 19-0 vote of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Its intervention will be critical, for Obama seems to be willfully ignoring Iran’s belligerent behavior and its growing influence over events in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sanaa. Freed from sanctions, Iran may become even more aggressive.

Dennis Ross is perhaps our leading government authority in terms of experience and knowledge of the Middle East. He doesn’t see any rainbows, only the storm clouds gathering: “At some point, the Obama administration changed its objective from one of transforming the Iranian nuclear program to one of ensuring that Iran could not have a breakout time of less than one year,“ Ross wrote in Politico. This change, Ross notes, comes from a decision that the U.S. could not alter Iran’s plans, “so instead we needed to focus on constraining their capabilities.”

Obama’s Iran Deal Is Still Far from Settled

by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY September 5, 2015

The review process under the Corker law never began — by the law’s own terms.

To undermine President Obama’s atrocious Iran deal despite the Republican-controlled Congress’s irresponsible Corker legislation, it will be necessary to follow, of all things, the Corker legislation.

On Wednesday, Barbara Mikulski became the 34th Senate Democrat to announce support for the deal, which lends aid and comfort to a regime that continues to call for “Death to America.” Under the Corker Roadmap to Catastrophe, Mikulski’s assent ostensibly puts President Obama over the top. After all, the legislation sponsored by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) and other Beltway GOP leaders reverses the Constitution’s presumptions against international agreements that harm national security. In essence, Corker requires dissenters from the Iran pact to round up a two-thirds supermajority opposition in both congressional chambers (67 senators and 290 House members). If the Constitution were followed, the burden would be on the president to convince either 67 senators to support a treaty, or majorities of both chambers to make the pact legally binding through ordinary legislation.

Mikulski’s announcement meant that dissenters would now be able to muster no more than 66 Senate votes against the deal. In fact, they won’t get that many. Additional Democrats, such as Cory Booker (N.J.) and Mark Warner (Va.), have dutifully trudged into Obama’s camp.

As things are trending, Democrats may even be spared the embarrassment of having to cast formal votes in favor of the appalling deal they gently describe as “flawed.” There are 46 Senate Democrats (including a pair of nominal “independents”). Only three Democrats — Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), and Ben Cardin (Md.) — have committed to voting “no.” Thus, Obama may well amass the 41 votes needed to filibuster Senate consideration of the Iran deal. He would then avoid the humiliation of having to veto a “resolution of disapproval” that would illustrate how intensely unpopular his deal is with Congress and the public.

So game over, right?

Wrong.

While maddening, the Corker bill is not an abject congressional surrender to Obama and Tehran. It is a conditional surrender. It would grant Obama grudging congressional endorsement of the deal in the absence of a now unattainable veto-proof resolution of disapproval, but only if Obama fulfills certain basic terms. Obama has not complied with the most basic one: the mandate that he provide the complete Iran deal for Congress’s consideration. Therefore, notwithstanding Washington’s frenzied assumption that the 60-day period for a congressional vote is winding down, the clock has never actually started to run. Congress’s obligations under Corker have never been triggered; the Corker process is moot.

As I have previously outlined, Obama has withheld from Congress the Iran deal’s key inspection and verification provisions. As is his wont, the president is engaged in a fraud. He and his underlings repeatedly promised the public that there would be aggressive inspections and that Iran would have to come clean about its prior nuclear work so we could have an accurate baseline to determine whether the mullahs cheat in the future. But Iran was never going to agree to such terms.

Our legacy-hunting ideologue of a president naturally capitulated on this point, but he also understood that if his capitulation were obvious — if the inspection and verification terms were revealed to be a joke — even Democrats might abandon him. So Obama and his factotum, Secretary of State John Kerry, snuck these terms into a “side deal” that is purported to be strictly between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Notwithstanding that they are the crux of the deal from the American perspective, Obama takes the position that these terms may not be revealed to Congress, a stance the IAEA has dutifully backed.

Sorry, Mr. President, too-clever-by-half won’t get it done this time — or at least it shouldn’t, as long as Republicans follow the law they wrote and Obama signed.

The Corker legislation — formally known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 — is crystal clear. In its very first section, the act requires the president to transmit to Congress “the agreement. . . . including all related materials and annexes.” It is too late to do that now: the act dictates that it was to have been done “not later than five days after reaching the agreement” — meaning July 19, since the agreement was finalized on July 14.

Underscoring the mandate that all relevant understandings in the Iran deal — including, of course, the essential understandings — must be provided to lawmakers, the act explicitly spells out a definition of the “Agreement” in subsection (h)(1). Under it, this is what the administration was required to give Congress over six weeks ago in order to trigger the afore-described Corker review process:

The term ‘agreement’ means an agreement related to the nuclear program of Iran . . . regardless of the form it takes, . . . including any joint comprehensive plan of action entered into or made between Iran and any other parties, and any additional materials related thereto, including annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements, implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical or other understandings, and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.

The act could not be more emphatic: To get the advantage of the favorable Corker formula that allows him to lift the anti-nuclear sanctions with only one-third congressional support, the president was required to supply Congress with every scintilla of information regarding verification. In particular, the act expressly demands disclosure of the terms pertinent to whether the IAEA is capable of executing aggressive inspections in Iran and has a plausible, enforceable plan to do so.

That is why, in conjunction with providing Congress the entire agreement, including any and all “side deals” between Iran and the IAEA, the act mandates that Secretary Kerry provide a “verification assessment report.” In it, the Obama administration must demonstrate not only how it (i) “will be able to verify that Iran is complying with its obligations and commitments” and (ii) will ensure the “adequacy of the safeguards and other control mechanisms” to ensure that Iran cannot “further any nuclear-related military or nuclear explosive purpose.” The administration must further explain:

the capacity and capability of the International Atomic Energy Agency to effectively implement the verification regime required by or related to the agreement, including whether the International Atomic Energy Agency will have sufficient access to investigate suspicious sites or allegations of covert nuclear-related activities and whether it has the required funding, manpower, and authority to undertake the verification regime required by or related to the agreement.

Nor is that all. In making this report, the administration is required to rebut a presumption, based on solid experience, that Iran will cheat. Specifically, it is to be presumed that the jihadist regime will “use all measures not expressly prohibited by the agreement to conceal activities that violate its obligations,” and that it will “alter or deviate from standard practices in order to impede efforts that verify that Iran is complying with those obligations and commitments.”

Understand: It is indisputable that (a) the administration has not provided the Iran–IAEA side deal; (b) the IAEA is not up to the inspection task; (c) the Iranian regime is drastically restricting the IAEA’s access to suspect sites, even to the point of insisting that it will “self-inspect” by providing its own site samples rather than permitting IAEA physical seizures, a point on which Obama and the IAEA have remarkably acquiesced; and (d) Obama claims the Iranian regime can be trusted despite his deal’s laughably inadequate verification standards. To the contrary, the act dictates that (a) the administration must provide the side deal, (b) the IAEA must be capable of doing credible inspections; (c) the IAEA must be permitted by Iran to do credible inspections; and (d) the Iranian regime must not be trusted and will presumptively cheat.

Do you sense something of a disconnect between what Obama has proposed and what the act requires?

This is not a close call. To make it even simpler, even if the side deal were not critical to any assessment of the overall agreement (and it plainly is), the act explicitly required the administration to transmit it to Congress by July 19 (five days after the deal was reached). The side deal has never been provided. The administration’s failure to comply with the Corker legislation’s conditions means Congress’s reciprocal obligation to review the agreement and enable Obama to lift sanctions — in the teeth of massive majority opposition — has never been triggered.

It is not enough to say that Congress has no obligation to proceed with the Corker review process. It would, under the act, be impermissible for Congress to do so. This, by the way, is not just a straightforward legal fact; it is a matter of integrity.

Over deep opposition from the base voters who gave the GOP control of both houses of Congress, Republican leaders insisted on passing the anti-constitutional, Obama-backed Corker legislation on the (absurd) rationale that only by doing so could they make sure that the full agreement, every bit of it, would be revealed to Congress and the American people. This was a meager objective, since revelation of a disastrous deal is useless if, to get it, Congress had to forfeit its power to reject the deal. But regardless of where one stood in the intramural debate over whether achieving full exposure of Obama’s Iran deal was worth surrendering Congress’s constitutional advantages, the blunt fact is that full exposure has not been achieved.

The mandate that the Iran deal must be revealed in its entirety represents both a solemn political commitment by Republicans and an explicit legal requirement of the act. Obama has failed to comply with that mandate. Therefore, the Corker review process must not go forward.

There are many more things to be said about this. For example, it remains true, as I have previously asserted, that the Corker process should be deemed null and void because Obama’s indefensible deal is fundamentally different from the narrow nuclear-weapons pact that the Corker legislation assumed. Obama’s deal purports to relieve our enemies of restrictions against their promotion of terrorism and acquisition of ballistic missiles and conventional weapons. The Act prohibits this. Under its provisions, the Corker review process may be applied only to an agreement restricted to Iran’s nuclear program. See subsection (d)(7): “United States sanctions on Iran for terrorism, human rights abuses, and ballistic missiles will remain in place under an agreement.” (As we’ve seen, “agreement” is defined in subsection (h)(1) to relate only to “the nuclear program of Iran.”)

There is, moreover, a solid case, posited by Harold Furchtgott-Roth in Forbes, that Obama’s Iran deal effectively amends the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by dramatically altering Iran’s obligations under it. Because the Constitution makes treaties the law of the land, the legal equivalent of congressional statutes, a treaty can be superseded only by another treaty or an act of Congress. An executive agreement with minority congressional assent is insufficient.

The Corker review process, even if it were to go forward in contravention of the act’s terms, would apply only to the sanctions. It would not address the separate and profound question of whether Iran remains bound by its legal NPT obligations. That is a question the United States must resolve under our constitutional law, not based on bloviating by Obama, Kerry, or Iran’s foreign minister about purported dictates of international law.

Still, despite all the strong arguments to be made against the Iran deal, we must be realistic about what can be achieved here.

As I have been arguing for weeks, Congress must scrap the Corker process and treat Obama’s Iran deal as either a treaty or proposed legislation. Consequently, I could not agree more with my friend Jim Geraghty that the Senate should regard the deal as a treaty and vote it down decisively — as I’ve pointed out, senators don’t need the president’s cooperation to do this; their authority to review international agreements as treaties comes from the Constitution, not from Obama.

Yet I differ slightly with Jim on why it is important to do this. It is not for the purpose of influencing judicial consideration of the Iran deal. The courts are unlikely to referee a dispute regarding the relative power of the political branches to bind the nation to international agreements — even though the judges may have to get involved to the extent the sanctions affect the rights of private parties.

No, the reason to reject the Iran deal as a treaty is to lay the groundwork for the next president to abandon the deal. That involves putting other countries on notice, immediately, that the U.S. statutory sanctions are still in effect; that Obama is powerless to lift them permanently; that the next president is likely to enforce them; and that countries, businesses, and individuals that rely on Obama’s mere executive agreement as a rationale for resuming commerce with Tehran do so at their peril.

It is crucial to understand the state of play here. First, there is no stopping Obama from making an executive agreement with Iran, as long as the agreement does not violate the Constitution, federal statutes, and ratified treaties. He is the president, and he gets to conduct foreign policy as long as that is the case — but only while that is the case. Unlike treaties and statutes, Obama’s executive agreements do not bind our nation once he is gone. Second, because Congress never anticipated an Iran-friendly president like Obama, it provided presidents with authority to waive the existing sanctions — although not to lift them permanently. For now, this authority is Obama’s and he is entitled to use it, however reckless this may be.

Thus, Congress cannot “defeat” Obama’s Iran deal in the sense of eradicating it. As long as he is president, Obama can try to carry out his executive agreement even if Congress refuses to give it the force of binding law.

Congress can, nevertheless, delegitimize the deal by illustrating in a powerful way that it is merely an executive agreement between Iran and Obama. The sovereign — the American people — remains overwhelmingly opposed. The party to which the people have given a majority in Congress must make clear that the Iran deal is not the law of the land, and that the deal will be renounced the minute a new Republican president takes office.
To do this, a preliminary step must be taken: Congress must undo the Corker legislation’s damage.

The Corker legislation was a lapse in judgment because it gave congressional assent to the permanent lifting of U.S. sanctions absent a veto-proof majority for maintaining them — which Republicans should have known was unattainable. The fallout of this lapse could be significant if the Corker review process is allowed to proceed.

From a legal standpoint, by going forward with the review process despite Obama’s failure to comply with the Corker legislation’s terms, Congress could be seen as forgiving Obama’s default. If lawmakers then go ahead with the vote on the Iran deal that the Republican opposition must inevitably lose because of Corker’s “minority wins” process, there would be a very reasonable legal argument that the sanctions have been repealed.

Republicans cannot let that happen. If the sanctions were deemed repealed, then the next president’s position would be dramatically weakened: Not only would the sanctions have to be reinstated by new law; it would be much more difficult politically for the next president to renounce Obama’s deal. Other countries would forcefully contend that the U.S. double-crossed them — that they lifted their sanctions, and commenced commerce with Iran, in reliance on Congress’s Corker-skewed “approval” of Obama’s deal.

As I have demonstrated above, it would be a violation of law to proceed with the Corker review process because (a) the administration has not complied with the Corker legislation’s mandate that the entire Iran deal be supplied to Congress by July 19 and (b) the Corker review process is explicitly limited to Iran’s nuclear program, while Obama’s deal, by contrast, goes far beyond nukes, eliminating anti-terrorism, anti–ballistic missile, and anti-weapons restrictions that the Corker legislation requires to be kept in place.

So the preliminary step that must be taken is a resolution by Congress stating that (a) the Corker review process cannot proceed because the Obama administration has failed to comply with the Corker legislation’s express conditions; (b) therefore, under the legislation’s terms, Congress cannot proceed with an up-or-down vote on the Iran deal; and (c) the sanctions remain in effect, even if they are temporarily dormant because Obama won’t enforce them.

Yes, Obama would veto the resolution (even though it is undeniable that he has not complied). But his veto would be irrelevant. Congress’s resolution explaining why no vote was taken on the Iran deal, which would pass overwhelmingly, would stand as the definitive statement to Iran and the rest of the world of why Congress has not attempted to pass a resolution of disapproval under the Corker process: It is not a matter of not having the votes; it is a matter of the president’s default. The Senate could then immediately follow that up by deeming Obama’s Iran deal as a treaty and voting it down by a wide margin.

Of course Obama would go characteristically demagogic in response. He would pretend that his default never happened and insist that Congress’s failure to enact a resolution of disapproval under the Corker framework means the sanctions are lifted forever. He would declaim that, under international law, the Security Council resolution he orchestrated before going to Congress binds our country to his Iran deal — to his empowerment of our enemies — even if our own Constitution has been flouted.

Let him rant and rave. He will only be president for another 16 months. This is now about what happens when he is gone. Obama’s arrogance and overreach have given Republicans a golden opportunity to correct their Corker misstep. They can still preserve the sanctions, preserve the NPT, and clarify that Obama’s green light to Iran on terrorism promotion and military build-up will not be worth the paper it is written on once he vacates the Oval Office.

By doing so, the GOP would not only reclaim the mantle of national security leadership; they would tee the 2016 election up as a referendum on the deeply unpopular Iran deal: Whom should the nation trust, Republicans who would sweep the Iran deal aside or Democrats who favor giving material support to an incorrigible enemy braying “Death to America”?

Even today’s breed of Republican ought to see the sense in that. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute.